Starring Lisa Caruccio Came (Avelina), Alexiane Cazenave (Anna), Don Gilet (Judd), Laurel Lefkow (Mal), Erik Madsen (Thorsteinn), Freya Mavor (Trieste), Yasmin Mwanza (Grace) and Clive Russell (Sweetie)

Directed by Ken Bentley

Editing and sound design by Richard Fox

Written by Kirsty Logan

Bafflegab for Audible, available now

Trieste is a documentary filmmaker and cave diver. She’s also one half of a whole; her dive and documentary partner, and lover, hasn’t made the journey to the Arctic. The plan was for the pair of them to dive on a famous shipwreck. Instead it’s just Trieste alone in an ailing base with doctor Mal (Laurel Lefkow), fragile diver tender Thorsteinn (Erik Madsen), amiable and hyper competent dive partner Grace (Yasmin Mwanza), pseudo-cook and former rock star Judd (Don Gilet) and Sweetie (Clive Russell), Mal’s husband and poster boy for successfully controlled anger issues. None of them are quite right. None of them are quite comfortable. All of their voices carry and as the winds kick in, Trieste learns just how far they do…

Kirsty Logan is one of this generation’s strongest writers, and her ability to dance along the line between reality, fantasy, intimacy and horror is unparalleled. There’s a sense of the ocean to all of her work and here more than ever, the vast empty cathedral spaces of the Arctic and the ocean meaning the characters are always fragile, always small and always painfully struggling against the environment and the noise in their own heads. The sense of unease throughout, buoyed by Richard Fox’s startlingly good sound design and Ken Bentley’s subtle direction is constant and this is a book that haunts you even as something haunts Trieste.

The difficulty with a story like this is the dismount. The mounting unease and escalating level of threat and clue is hard to maintain but harder still to land. As the situation worsens, Logan shows us just who these people really are and does so in a manner that’s quiet and personal and profoundly unsettling. There’s an incident involving Sweetie and what happens when he wakes up which is the stark halogen light of a nightmare in prose form. Trieste’s plundering of Mal’s therapy session tapes constantly keeps the listener off balance as transition from one-to-one recordings to the base and back again. Words and names are distorted, characters shift who they’re talking to mid-sentence. Something is wrong, something is RIGHT THERE and all of them can sense it and none of them can see it. This is arctic horror done right, it’s eyes wide, frost in its hair and nowhere close enough to an exit.

Then there’s the dismount and it’s where the entire production is at its bravest. Madsen gets a pair of chapters to himself which are jaw-droppingly well written, directed and acted and that’s followed by an ending which plays notes from The Perfect Storm, The Thing and classic video game Dear Esther in a very different, very new order. We learn enough about everyone to understand why they’re there. We see how their individual tragedies are bound together with video tape and grief. We see how sometimes, when you’re underwater, the direction you need to go may not be the direction you expect. Most of all, we see each of the base’s inhabitants, either wilfully refusing to be broken by their pains or doing their best, all the way to the end.

Verdict: This is demanding, supernatural, literary fiction which walks the boundary between two worlds, two mediums, two styles. It offers you choice instead of certainty, perception instead of exposition and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since I listened to it. Haunting, in every best way. 9/10

Alasdair Stuart